To be fair, I don’t know any benchmark for this comparison. But I just tried a relatively big file with both of them. Opening part is not really noticeable, but fast-forwarding is much better and slicker in mpv. In VLC it looks like it’s jumping between scenes, in mpv you actually see the motion of it’s getting fast-forward.
Yeah, with mpv you can even hold the jump 10/60 sec forward/backward button pressed and the frames just fly in the screen. Vlc seeking is really slow in comparison.
and while we are at that, MPV also has a working reverse play implementation (though that’s like a slideshow), and it can very seamlessly do frame by frame playback, the hotkey of which just does normal playback perfectly while it’s long pressed
Lol, what? Do people really care about the ‘speed’ of their video player in 2025?
it literally has a lower CPU consumption, even when using hardware decoding. and even when playback is paused.
lower CPU consumption means more free resources for other programs, and lower power usage, which is more battery life.
it also seeks much smoother, I mean quicker with less delay
You can still use older hardware in 2025. So, yes.
Yeah, but is the speed difference between the two really noticeable?
Playing high quality 4k videos on old hardware, it seems to make a noticeable difference.
Yes it’s quite noticeable, especially with the bigger file size. mpv is really light.
Are there any benchmarks to support this?
To be fair, I don’t know any benchmark for this comparison. But I just tried a relatively big file with both of them. Opening part is not really noticeable, but fast-forwarding is much better and slicker in mpv. In VLC it looks like it’s jumping between scenes, in mpv you actually see the motion of it’s getting fast-forward.
Yeah, with mpv you can even hold the jump 10/60 sec forward/backward button pressed and the frames just fly in the screen. Vlc seeking is really slow in comparison.
and while we are at that, MPV also has a working reverse play implementation (though that’s like a slideshow), and it can very seamlessly do frame by frame playback, the hotkey of which just does normal playback perfectly while it’s long pressed
My laptop from 2014 significantly loads .ts video faster on MPV than VLC.
VLC even stuck on video seeking for a few seconds.